Tag Archives: Dysfunctional family

The life roles we play – our many personas

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By David Joel Miller, MS, Licensed Therapist & Licensed Counselor.

How many hats do you wear?
Photo courtesy of Pixabay.com

How many role hats do you wear?

In each of our lives, we all come to play many roles. These need not be false or fake, they are all facets of who we. None of them defines us in our totality. We are each progressively children, lovers, parents, and finally grandparents. We are employees, sometimes employers, and eventually retirees. We may also need to enact the role of a recovering person. Moving between roles can be full of challenges and dangers.

There are also a host of dysfunctional roles we may get trapped into playing.

When we are children we play the role of a child. Some families had a set of roles that everyone played. In family systems work, it has become common to talk about those varied roles you may have been asked to play and how they have affected the person you have become today.

Dysfunctional families keep these roles in the closet like a set of hats.

When someone leaves the family they may go to the closet get that hat out and pass it on to the next in line. Most families have a hero role. The child who does everything right and everyone gets compared to. One of the other people in the family may assume the Black Sheep role. Everything that goes wrong in the family is that person’s fault. But let the hero or the black sheep leave, by death or escape, and the family recruits a new person to play that role.

Were you the family hero?

Have you grown up believing that you had to be perfect to be any good? Do you need to rescue others to have a self-worth? You may have gotten locked into the hero role.

You may have been cast as the black sheep.

Were you told that everything wrong in the family was your fault, that you would never amount to anything? Were you told you would end up an alcoholic just like your father? Just as we may try to live up to people’s expectations many of us have learned to live down. The result is that expected to fail we do just that.

It is hard to stop playing the child to your parent’s adult.

People also get locked into the child role. They find it difficult to disagree with their parents or make their own choices. Sometimes to escape the orbit of their parents these folks have to create some sort of explosion and force a rupture in the family so they can escape the child role.

Every new couple has to navigate this task. You leave a family so does your partner. Together you create a new family. The task becomes which family traditions do you follow or do you create your own traditions.

If your parents tried to protect you from life by keeping you a child and not allowing you to make your own choices you may find it extra difficult to assume the role of partner in this new family. You can be stuck in an old role that interferes with finding your new role.

Roles – recovery roles and role conflicts.

Many times roles come into conflict. Your children want or need you to do some things and you need to be somewhere else doing something else. Learning to juggle and balance all the roles you need to fill can take practice.

Recovering people also have to learn to include the role of a recovering person in their repertoire. Do you do things to take care of yourself? Can you balance your need for self-care with your needs to care for others?

Some jobs include expectations that you will drink or do drugs like your coworkers. These roles conflict with the things you will need to stay in the role of a recovered person.

If you find yourself wearing many role hats, you may need to learn to make quick changes. You may also need to reexamine the roles you are playing and to discard some of those old role hats that no longer fit.

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My newest book is now available. It was my opportunity to try on a new genre. I’ve been working on this book for several years, but now seem like the right time to publish it.

Story Bureau.

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Bumps on the Road of Life. Whether you struggle with anxiety, depression, low motivation, or addiction, you can recover. Bumps on the Road of Life is the story of how people get off track and how to get your life out of the ditch.

Dark Family Secrets: Doris wants to get her life back, but small-town prejudice could shatter her dreams.

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What would you do if you found a letter to a detective describing a crime and you knew the writer and detective were dead, and you could be next?

Sasquatch. Three things about us, you should know. One, we have seen the past. Two, we’re trapped there. Three, I don’t know if we’ll ever get back to our own time.

For these and my upcoming books; please visit my Author Page – David Joel Miller

Want the latest blog posts as they publish? Subscribe to this blog.

For videos, see: Counselorssoapbox YouTube Video Channel

Are you a Parentified Child?

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By David Joel Miller, MS, Licensed Therapist & Licensed Counselor.

Children working

Parentified child.
Photo courtesy of pixabay

If you are a Parentified Child how do you ever finish growing up?

Some children grow up way too young. Are you one of those people?  Did you take on roles that were far too adult for your age? Parentified children begin to act like adults before they ever have the chance to be kids. This causes them problems later in life.

If you came from a dysfunctional home, and there are lots of different types of dysfunctional homes, you may have been cast in the role of parent for your mother or father. They played the child role; you tried to be the responsible adult. You made their food, cleaned the house, and may have cared for your siblings. You may have had to call their bosses or make excuses for them when they were not able to function as an adult.

If you had to be a surrogate parent before you were able to be a child, how did you learn what to do as an adult, and when do you ever get to be a child? Parentified children, grown into adults who never had a childhood become either super responsible or irresponsible to the max.

We often see this in families where a parent is an alcoholic or an addict. They are so debilitated much of the time that a child steps in and takes care of the parent and fills the parent’s other roles also. This parentified child becomes so used to being the responsible, caregiving one, that they all too often end up in dysfunctional relationships hooked up with an immature adult that needs a caregiver rather than a partner.

The little girl who goes to school, say in the third grade, but then goes home to fix dinner for her younger siblings, is acting like a parentified child. She may have to do the laundry or even feed and change the baby. She becomes the parent for her siblings. What happens to this child when they grow up?

One result of being too mature too soon is the unresolved need to be a child and play. These Parentified children are quick to jump into sexual relationships. They go straight from being a child-mother to their brothers, sisters, and parent, to being a partner and mother or father themselves. There is never a time to get their needs met.

These Parentified children are at high risk to abuse substances themselves to cope with the too early assumed responsibilities of being a parent. They are also at risk at some point in their life to veer off and go through a period of irresponsible behavior, trying to learn to play and have fun. What they may not have learned is how to have fun without indulging in drugs, alcohol, or other risky behavior.

They are also at risk to never really learn functional ways to parent. Having had to be adults at a young age they expect their own children to start taking on that role before those children are ready. This results in a lot of family dysfunction.

If you grew up in a home where you had to take on too many adult responsibilities at a very young age you may not have had good role models for the ways in which you need to behave. You have had to make the rules up as you go along. Often you have paid the price of having to learn how functional people behave by trial and error.

One major challenge for the parentified child is to learn about developmental milestones, what should you have learned and how should you have behaved at eight, at eighteen, and at twenty-eight. Many parentified children need to take parenting classes so they can parent themselves as well as parent their children.

Did you become a parentified child? Do you now have to learn how to play, have fun, and go through the process of growing up all over again?

Staying connected with David Joel Miller

Seven David Joel Miller Books are available now!

My newest book is now available. It was my opportunity to try on a new genre. I’ve been working on this book for several years, but now seem like the right time to publish it.

Story Bureau.

Story Bureau is a thrilling Dystopian Post-Apocalyptic adventure in the Surviving the Apocalypse series.

Baldwin struggles to survive life in a post-apocalyptic world where the government controls everything.

As society collapses and his family gets plunged into poverty, Baldwin takes a job in the capital city, working for a government agency called the Story Bureau. He discovers the Story Bureau is not a benign news outlet but a sinister government plot to manipulate society.

Bumps on the Road of Life. Whether you struggle with anxiety, depression, low motivation, or addiction, you can recover. Bumps on the Road of Life is the story of how people get off track and how to get your life out of the ditch.

Dark Family Secrets: Doris wants to get her life back, but small-town prejudice could shatter her dreams.

Casino Robbery Arthur Mitchell escapes the trauma of watching his girlfriend die. But the killers know he’s a witness and want him dead.

Planned Accidents  The second Arthur Mitchell and Plutus mystery.

Letters from the Dead: The third in the Arthur Mitchell mystery series.

What would you do if you found a letter to a detective describing a crime and you knew the writer and detective were dead, and you could be next?

Sasquatch. Three things about us, you should know. One, we have seen the past. Two, we’re trapped there. Three, I don’t know if we’ll ever get back to our own time.

For these and my upcoming books; please visit my Author Page – David Joel Miller

Want the latest blog posts as they publish? Subscribe to this blog.

For videos, see: Counselorssoapbox YouTube Video Channel